getting lost

After yesterday's post, nobody came to the PCO office so I decided to try to make it home alone.

Um, yeah. The tro-tro stop was easy, and the road to follow, but then things were much less clear. It's further than I remembered. So I took a path too soon and soon was immersed in an area that seemed vaguely familiar. Children shouting, "Hello! Oblony!" And I responded, "Do you know where I live?" A very quiet, regal 12-year old girl and her brother knew the general direction and showed me the maize in the bucket on their heads.

Then, a man emerging from an outdoor toilet said, "hello? Can I help you?" Um, yeah. An old woman had seen me wandering, clearly lost, and told him to help me. Fortunately, he knew Emmanuel and knew exactly where I needed to go, and he escorted me the distance. thanks, Ambrose!

But the house door was locked, and Amass had moved the key without telling us, and I was locked out. There's an old very poor man who spends most his time under a tree outside our house, so I sat near him on the step. I took a short nap, went to a nearby kiosk and got some "biscuits" and malta - which was this really nasty beer without alcohol and ended up watering the ground.

Then a young girl, maybe 7 years old, walked up and said, "My mother calls you." Um, ok, I've been summoned. so, I followed her and the next thing i knew I was eating "fufu" with the family. The mother had seen me, had been talking with the tree man, and the father said that Ghanaian tradition would not allow them not to invite me. They were so nice and we had a nice time - interrupted when the others got home andI saw Gillian looking in my room - Zia the kitten had somehow been trapped in my room all day.

Not bad for a day of getting lost and locked outside. it's a little dangerous perhaps, my belief that no matter what happens things will work out for the best, but i'm happy to meet the neighbors.

We had a very long meeting this morning - yes we do that a lot, because we're planning so many things - and i took a very assertive role and we decided some good things. The most interesting was that most of the teachers we had hired were Krahn - a tribe from Liberia - and we needed more diversity. Remember that tribal conflicts led to horrible bloodshed in Liberia, so PCO is based on bridging those differences. Of course I was at first annoyed - the reason they were mostly Krahn is that mostly Krahn applied. At least in part because there was little advertising, so many were people that Joseph knows. So, Morris will make public announcements and we'll begin the interviewing again on Wednesday.

I really like Joseph - and that is at least in part because he's so damn Western and feels so comfortable to me. He's obsessive about timeliness and such. I have a great picture of him with me which I hope to be able to upload - he's being goofy, which is odd for him because he's usually very serious. But, he was asking a big favor of me and I was giving him a hard time.

Emmanuel and Lawrence and I took tro-tro into Accra, and they just took off for a little bit. Oh, need to get to work seeing if I can figure out the website update. Emmanuel is quite the task master. no, not really - but he works so hard - and I just learned today that all the work Joseph does is volunteer, and I don't want to be a slacker when there are things to be done.

I need to find money for PCO. Grants maybe, begging from friends maybe. The school is really important and there's no funding. the organization is a really good one and they do good work that is really important. I'm contemplating coming back to do dissertation work - well, time will tell. It's only day 4. The other volunteers were commenting about how quickly I jumped into projects, but I'm just lucky that these are issues and projects that I have experience with. the meetings are brutally long and sometimes I get impatient, but they're quite remarkable for the consensus building and all that is done.

Oh, met again Augustine who came to the meeting. He is one of the most articulate people I've ever met, and I said so - he could take everything everybody said, add his own wisdom, and make quite a statement. We chatted on the way out, and he was the first to ask about my religion. Turns out he's a charismatic pastor. But he was willing to disagree with me, and i like that, and we may have more arguments in the future. I try to be careful with the others because they are less likely to disagree with me andI don't want to just impose my beliefs.

I apologize for the typos - the keyboards all seem to stick badly.

OK, on to work now.